The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

One of the dangers of moonshine wit is that the so-called humor will be misunderstood. When I write about the neighbors, they think I’m actually writing about them. That’s the trouble with shotgun humor, it’s imprecise. I was really aiming at the house next door, not theirs. You know that, I know that, but try to convince them last night’s pellet blast rattling off their trailer’s aluminum siding was inadvertent. Gives them the willies and probably bad dreams too. But a writer has to write and a jokester has to joke, collateral damage be damned!

The Flatheads, our vintage car club in these parts, I have it on reputable reporting from a buddy who is one of the happy wrenchers, apparently feel that the name is derogatory, not funny. Now if you’re not an old car guy, you possibly don’t know that a flathead is an engine block before the modern engines we have today. Before the overhead valve engine, the Wankel rotary engine, before the hybrids, before battery powered Teslas. Flatheads were in vogue from the 1890’s to the 1950’s. They had poor compression ratios, weren’t very efficient, couldn’t really rev up like modern ones. Just so you know….

I’ll quit boring you with the history and mechanics of flatheads. All I want to get across here is that calling the car guyz Flatheads is sort of funny, at least to me. Kind of plays off the real thing and hints at, well, maybe these fellows are … okay, maybe it isn’t funny to them. I get that. Two Toke Tom thinks it’s funny, that’s good enough for me. And he’s an unofficial member of the club with his 1966 Volkswagen bus, the one you see with the peace sign and the faded Grateful Dead logo on the front end. Course, Tom thinks most everything is comical.

The point is, humor is in the eye of the beholder and yeah, sometimes a finger too. Just can’t be helped. And no, I’m not pissed off the boyz won’t give my 2010 truck full membership in their exclusive ranks. Has nothing to do with why I decided to call them Flatheads. Really, it doesn’t.

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